Monday, 19 October 2015

*Blog Tour * ~ The Human Script by Johnny Rich

Today Johnny is sharing with us how he found the inspiration for his novel.....

I’m going to tell you a lie.
Forgive me. It’s in a good cause. The lie is that the inspiration for my novel,
The Human Script, came to me in a
dream.

It sounds credible enough. I
certainly have come up with short stories in my sleep. But they are half-formed
blobs of ideas. As I try to trap them in words, they slip through my fingers. The
nonsenses and plot holes that never bother us in dreams mock me from the page.
By the time such stories have been wrangled into readability, they look no more
like their inspiration than a roast chicken resembles an egg.

Let’s try another lie. An
anecdote. A boy of ten or thereabouts – me – sits, cross-legged, in school
uniform shorts, homework done, tea eaten, in front of the wood-framed TV. On
the screen, Tomorrow’s World, a show
that popularised science through mind-blowing innovations like CDs and
automatic doors. On this episode, they had a vivarium of toads, which, they
claimed with rehearsed awe, were ‘clones’. This was long before Dolly the Sheep
– identical amphibians were an earlier milestone in genetic experimentation.

One toad was stretching up the
side as if trying to escape. Another sat grumpily watching. A third was
scraping at the gravel. As the presenter explained the marvels of their
similarity, I was struck only by how differently
they behaved. If they are identical, I thought, why aren’t they all doing the
same thing? Maybe, I wondered, the simple difference was that they couldn’t be
in the same place at the same time. That small difference made all the difference.

From such things thoughts are
sparked. Thoughts grow into ideas. Ideas beg for expression and sprout stories.
This is such stuff as novels are made of.

The curious musings of a boy were
themselves the small difference that sparked a fuse of thought that ended in a
novel that asks about how one thing causes another. Where the movie Sliding Doors asks, ‘what if?’, The Human Script asks, ‘Could it ever
have been otherwise?’

One more lie: there was no
inspiration, no cause. Just imagination. I made it up, conjured it, out of
nothing. Stare blankly out of a window long enough and your mind will start to
travel down paths of barely connected thought. Capture that butterfly of thought
at the right moment and you will not crush its wings. Like a hurricane caused
by the butterfly flapping, or like a universe sprung from a big bang of pure
energy, a fictional world can grow from a scintilla.

But can that be true? Can
something come from nothing? Surely, there had to be something to put the
butterfly there in the first place? A caterpillar, of course, but what was
before that? We’re back to chickens and eggs.

The truth is I cannot say what my
inspiration was. Like all fiction, my lies are just my efforts to be truer than
the truth.

There was no single event that
set my ideas in motion. My whole life (and indeed those of countless
generations before me) conspired to make The
Human Script the story that I wanted to tell. That is not to say all
creation existed for this purpose, merely that I and my novel are by-products
of existence.

As it dawned on me that I had
made the decision to write it (a realisation that emerged, rather than a moment
of revelation), I then needed to take hold of the reins of my inspiration. I
researched, spent time with geneticists, a Calvinist minister. I even pretended
to be homeless one night. New inspirations sprang on me.

It was an adventure, but I can’t
honestly say when it started, where, when or how. Nor if it’s over.

Have you ever felt like that
yourself? Not entirely in control. Not exactly reeling, but unsure why you do
stuff? Why stuff happened? Not imprisoned, but not free either. Like the world
might be your oyster, but you’re stuck inside its shell.

If so, The Human Script is a story that will explain why you feel like
that. I guarantee it will change your life, but only because everything does,
however small.

My thanks to Johnny for his guest post and to Karen at Red Button Publishing for the invitation to join in with this fun event.

My thoughts about The Human Script

I was bit out of my comfort zone
with this novel and for a time it took me a while to feel really comfortable
with the story. That's not to say the book is badly written, far from it, it's
really very cleverly put together, it's more that my involvement in the story
took a while to develop.

Chris Putnam is a scientist
working on the Human Genome Project. On the surface he seems an average young
man but he is troubled by indecision and feels that his life is drifting
aimlessly. He fears the loss of stability which is further compounded by the
ending of a relationship and the loss of his father. Changes in circumstance
force Chris into making some difficult decisions.

This is a slow burner of a novel
which takes a while to really get going but I'm glad I stuck with the story and
commend the author on an original and highly innovative novel.